The psalter in the prose lives of St Guthlac

The Anglo-Saxon hermit Guthlac of Crowland is the subject of an eighth-century Latin hagiography by the monk Felix. Felix’s Vita sancti Guthlaci was translated into Old English prose prior to the mid-tenth century. The Old English Life of Guthlac is generally close to the Latin, particularly in comparison to the more imaginative adaptations of Guthlac’s life found in the poems Guthlac A and Guthlac B, but nevertheless it has a distinct textual identity. The Psalter is important in both Felix’s vita and the Old English prose Life. This chapter examines which Psalms are used in Felix’s vita, which quotations are retained in the Old English Life, and what the handling of these quotations may suggest about the translator and copyists' knowledge of the Psalter. Felix depicts Guthlac as speaking psalm verses in response to threats from the demons that inhabit the island he has colonised. As the editor Bertram Colgrave has identified, Psalm quotations are also woven into the fabric of the vita at various points, indicating Felix’s deep knowledge of the Psalter. However, Colgrave was comparing the text of the vita to the Gallicanum Psalter, whereas Felix, as this chapter shows, was actually using the Romanum text, which affects the identification of a number of the psalm quotations in the vita. While the Old English translation cannot preserve Felix's embedded echoes of Scriptural language in the same way, direct psalm quotations are largely retained, and at points expanded. While it is clear that the scribe of the Vespasian text was more familiar with the Gallicanum Psalter, the original translator seems to have understood that Felix was using the Romanum text.